Chapter 12 - Victoria’s House
Victoria had not disappeared.
She had run.
There is a difference.
Her passport was gone.
Three suitcases were missing.
So was $180,000 from a personal account.
Police located her car at a private airfield.
But Victoria was not there.
Brooke was.
She had attempted to charter a flight to Nassau.
Investigators detained her before departure on financial warrants.
Liam was with a nanny.
That mattered more to me than anything else in that moment.
Whatever Brooke had done, Liam was still a child.
He did not deserve to become another Leo.
Child services placed him temporarily with Aaron after emergency paternity testing confirmed Aaron was his father.
Brooke screamed when they took her into custody.
Not about Liam.
About the money.
“She stole my life!”
She meant me.
Eleanor later told me Brooke insisted everything belonged to her because Dominic had promised to divorce me.
I almost felt sorry for how small that sounded.
Almost.
Victoria remained missing for twenty-three hours.
Then our investigator found something.
She owned a cottage in New Hampshire.
Purchased through a trust I had never heard of.
Police reached it just before dawn.
Victoria was inside.
So were eight boxes of Sterling Meridian financial records.
And a locked plastic container labeled LEO.
My hands shook when Eleanor told me.
“What was inside?”
“They haven’t opened it yet.”
“Why?”
“Your name is on some of the documents.”
I drove to the police station.
The container held school reports.
Doctor notes.
Printed emails.
Photographs.
And a handwritten journal.
Victoria had kept records.
Not because she felt guilty.
Because she believed she was building a case.
Against me.
Every time Leo cried after a canceled video call, she wrote:
Emotional instability following maternal abandonment.
Every time he refused food, she wrote:
Defiance.
Every time he asked when Mommy was coming home, she wrote:
Fixation.
Then I reached an entry dated five months earlier.
Dominic becoming weak.
Brooke says Clara may return permanently after Q4.
Must accelerate placement before Clara sees him.
My vision blurred.
The next page contained only one sentence.
If Leo is certified permanently impaired, Dominic controls Arthur’s trust.
There it was.
Written in Victoria’s own hand.
The trust.
Again.
Then I found something stapled behind the page.
A draft guardianship petition.
It proposed that if Dominic became unavailable, Victoria would become Leo’s financial guardian.
May you like
My mother-in-law had never intended the money to stay with Dominic.
She wanted control herself.
